Posts by antti kantee

The most time-consuming part of operating system development is obtaining
enough drivers to enable the OS to run real
applications which interact with the real world. NetBSD\'s rump kernels allow reducing
that time to almost zero, for example for developing special-purpose operating
systems for the cloud and embedded IoT devices. This arti [...]

A cyclic trend in operating systems is moving things in and out of the
kernel for better performance. Currently, the pendulum is swinging
in the direction of userspace being the locus of high performance.
The anykernel
architecture of NetBSD ensures that the same kernel drivers work in a
monolithic kernel, userspace and beyond. One of thos [...]

A cyclic trend in operating systems is moving things in and out of the
kernel for better performance. Currently, the pendulum is swinging
in the direction of userspace being the locus of high performance.
The anykernel
architecture of NetBSD ensures that the same kernel drivers work in a
monolithic kernel, userspace and beyond. One of thos [...]

Yesterday I wrote a serious,
user-oriented post about running applications directly on the Xen
hypervisor. Today I compensate for the seriousness by writing a
why-so-serious, happy-buddha type kernel hacker post. This post is
about using NetBSD kernel PCI drivers in
rump kernels
on Xen, with device access courtesy of Xen PCI passthrough.
[...]

Yesterday I wrote a serious,
user-oriented post about running applications directly on the Xen
hypervisor. Today I compensate for the seriousness by writing a
why-so-serious, happy-buddha type kernel hacker post. This post is
about using NetBSD kernel PCI drivers in
rump kernels
on Xen, with device access courtesy of Xen PCI passthrough.
[...]

There are a number of motivations for running applications directly on
top of the Xen hypervisor without resorting to a full general-purpose OS.
For example, one might want to maximally isolate applications with minimal
overhead. Leaving the OS out of the picture decreases overhead, since
for example the inter-application protection offered [...]

There are a number of motivations for running applications directly on
top of the Xen hypervisor without resorting to a full general-purpose OS.
For example, one might want to maximally isolate applications with minimal
overhead. Leaving the OS out of the picture decreases overhead, since
for example the inter-application protection offered [...]

Ever since I realized that the
anykernel
was the best way to construct a modern general purpose operating system
kernel, I have been performing experiments by running unmodified
NetBSD kernel drivers in rump kernels in various environments
(nb. here driver does not mean a hardware device driver, but
any driver like a file system driver or TC [...]

Ever since I realized that the
anykernel
was the best way to construct a modern general purpose operating system
kernel, I have been performing experiments by running unmodified
NetBSD kernel drivers in rump kernels in various environments
(nb. here driver does not mean a hardware device driver, but
any driver like a file system driver or TC [...]

Some years ago I wrote about the possibility to load and use
standard NetBSD kernel modules in rump kernels on i386 and amd64.
With the recent developments in buildrump.sh and the improved
ability to host rump kernels on non-NetBSD platforms, I decided to try
loading a binary NetBSD kernel module into a rump kernel compiled for
and running o [...]

Some years ago I wrote about the possibility to load and use
standard NetBSD kernel modules in rump kernels on i386 and amd64.
With the recent developments in buildrump.sh and the improved
ability to host rump kernels on non-NetBSD platforms, I decided to try
loading a binary NetBSD kernel module into a rump kernel compiled for
and running o [...]

The unique anykernel capability of NetBSD allows the creation of
rump kernels, which are
partially paravirtualized kernels running on top of a high-level
hypervisor. This technology e.g. enables running the
same file system driver in the monolithic kernel or as a
microkernel style server in userspace. POSIX-compatible
systems have been mor [...]

The unique anykernel capability of NetBSD allows the creation of
rump kernels, which are
partially paravirtualized kernels running on top of a high-level
hypervisor. This technology e.g. enables running the
same file system driver in the monolithic kernel or as a
microkernel style server in userspace. POSIX-compatible
systems have been mor [...]

The NetBSD core team has announced
a tier system for the hardware architectures supported by NetBSD.
The tier system classifies ports into three tiers.
Summarizing, the tiers consist of ports that NetBSD will support, ports that NetBSD does its best to support,
and ports which may be desupported soon.
The purpose of this classification is to [...]

The NetBSD core team has announced
a tier system for the hardware architectures supported by NetBSD.
The tier system classifies ports into three tiers.
Summarizing, the tiers consist of ports that NetBSD will support, ports that NetBSD does its best to support,
and ports which may be desupported soon.
The purpose of this classification is to [...]

Rump is a componentization of the NetBSD kernel. It lends itself
to multiple uses, such as running kernel code as services in
userspace and for example makes the high-quality NetBSD kernel code
base available for use in multiserver microkernel operating systems.
Running unmodified NetBSD kernel code in standalone userspace
applications [...]

Rump is a componentization of the NetBSD kernel. It lends itself
to multiple uses, such as running kernel code as services in
userspace and for example makes the high-quality NetBSD kernel code
base available for use in multiserver microkernel operating systems.
Running unmodified NetBSD kernel code in standalone userspace
applications [...]

In April 2009 I got an email from Alessandro Forin containing
this picture as an attachment. His group
at Microsoft Research was investigating dynamically reconfigurable
computing and needed an operating system for testing purposes. I
was happy that they were using NetBSD for their research and was
especially pleased to learn that they had [...]

In April 2009 I got an email from Alessandro Forin containing
this picture as an attachment. His group
at Microsoft Research was investigating dynamically reconfigurable
computing and needed an operating system for testing purposes. I
was happy that they were using NetBSD for their research and was
especially pleased to learn that they had [...]

There are numerous good tools which do an excellent job of testing
kernel features and help to catch bugs. The more frequently they are
run as part of the regular development cycle, the more bugs they
expose before the bugs are shipped to be discovered by end users. However,
prior to being able to execute kernel tests configuration is
requ [...]